Monday, May 16, 2016

Prince – HitNRun Phase Two

The final album from His Purpleness debuted on the streaming
service Tidal in January, and got an official release a week after his death. This
is no Blackstar, which was David
Bowie’s final masterpiece, recorded while he knew he had a terminal cancer
diagnosis and intended to be a final artistic statement; indeed, Bowie died
three days after its release in January. HitNRun
Phase Two, on the other hand, is just another day at the office for Prince.
This is who Prince was at the end of his life: his innovative and weirder days
long behind him, a man comfortable in his own skin who just wants to write some
new jams that pay ode to the jazz, rock and soul he grew up on. It’s Prince on
autopilot—which for the most part is still good enough to take most modern icons
to school. His guitar skills, his acrobatic vocals, his distinctive harmony
arrangements, inviting his potential lovers to take a bath with him—here are all
the trademarks that remained constant no matter what sonic skin he inhabited.

But because this is Prince, our standards are understandably
high. So when he tosses off a rote rocker called “Screwdriver” (chorus lyric:
“I’m your driver, you’re my screw”)—that song has been floating around for
three years now, and should have been left alone—or attempts a lame come-on
like “We’ve got groovy potential,” it’s more than obvious the legend is phoning
it in. One of the better tracks, “Xtraloveable,” dates back to a demo from the
early 1980s.

The album opens with “Baltimore,” a song written, recorded and released
in May 2015 after the death of that city’s Freddie Gray in police custody,
eight months after the shooting of Michael Brown in St. Louis sparked the Black
Lives Matter movement. Prince was never much for politics (“You say you want a
leader / but you can’t seem to make up your mind,” he sang in “Purple Rain”),
outside the apocalyptic nuclear paranoia that underscored his earliest work
(“1999,” “Ronnie Talk to Russia”). At the beginning of his career, he
deliberately instructed his record company to portray him as mixed race and not
to market him as “black,” which was encoded in Purple Rain, where his fictional mother was Italian. But in the
last year of his life, Prince was a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter,
playing a free concert in Baltimore after the riots, and then this song
appeared: explicitly name-checking Gray and Brown, the video featuring footage
of protests.

What’s odd is that the song itself is anything but a fiery
protest song, or even a lament like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”—or indeed,
Prince’s own “Sign O the Times.” Instead, it’s an upbeat, gospel-tinged pop
song with a string section and lyrics like, “We’re tired of the cryin’ and
people dyin’ let’s take all the guns away.” If you weren’t paying attention,
you might mistake it for an unusually good civic tourism jingle.

Prince confounded all of us—even his hardcore fans—throughout
his career, so it’s not the least bit surprising that he did so right up to the
end. More telling than his final album will be what makes its way out of his
vault in the years to come. (April 28)